Thread by @NewStatesman

We have long known what oligarchy and kleptocracy meant in theory, but Russia’s savagery is forcing the UK into a national moment of recognition.
newstatesman.com/culture/books/…

So how exactly does the UK prop up Putin’s gangster state?

🟥Firstly, Slapps (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”) - intimidatory actions brought against journalists for reporting on the business dealings of Russian oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich and their associated entities.

🟥Secondly, UWOs (unexplained wealth orders), the all-but-unused mechanism for confiscating the assets of foreign kleptocrats.

🟥Thirdly, the Scottish partnership, created in 1890, and the Scottish limited partnership (SLP), created in 1907, were meant to create “a legal person distinct from the partners of whom it is composed”.

The SLP went largely unnoticed by everyone until, in the 1980s, private equity funds realised that this legal person was, for purposes of taxation and regulation, just the man to take delivery of their profits.

Years later, criminals from around the world realised that this was a way to deliver money they’d made from organised crime or appropriated from their government.

In 2018, a year after Britain deregulated its partnerships law even further, whistle-blowers revealed that over the course of nine years, more than €200bn from the former USSR had been laundered through the Estonian branch of Denmark’s Danske Bank.

Much of the money ended up in UK limited partnerships, which allowed their true owners to remain anonymous, but in 2013 it was revealed that some of the funds were from the family and associates of Putin.

Britain’s professional and political elite has given much more direct assistance to Putin’s regime.

From 2007 onwards, British businesses and parliamentarians helped improve the image of a Ukrainian billionaire called Dmitry Firtash, who was, along with Gazprom, the joint owner of RUE, which sold Russian gas through Ukraine into Europe.

Putin was already alleged to have interfered in Ukraine’s 2004 election, by rigging the vote and poisoning the rival of his chosen candidate Viktor Yanukovych.

When the subsequent popular uprising deprived him of victory, Putin simply cut off the country’s gas and forced Ukraine’s democratically elected government into a new deal with RUE – and, by extension, the Kremlin.

Dmitry Firtash (perhaps sensing that he was no longer welcome in Ukraine) did what comes naturally to the kleptocracy, and moved to Kensington.

There, he was advised by a Conservative MP and a property developer who was a substantial Tory donor, honoured by Cambridge University, introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh and invited to open trading on the London Stock Exchange.

Liquid assets flow towards the place that will do the least to impede them, the place with the lowest standards – Britain, the Cheap State.
newstatesman.com/culture/books/…